


Why Pyromaniacs are the Worst: A Compilation

by StopIWantToTalkAboutCheese



Series: MISSING: Tales From the Life of a Private Investigator [7]
Category: The Heroes of Olympus - Rick Riordan
Genre: Fire, I’m back, POV Outsider, Well not really, an disproportionate amount of TV was watched in this fic, enjoy!!, i meant to have this out way earlier but then rl got in the way, lots of fire, my bad - Freeform, oh well, there are more convenient meetings in this series than a dickens novel, uhhh what else can i say, well anyway, whoops, with even more improbable situations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-23
Updated: 2021-01-23
Packaged: 2021-03-15 18:27:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,338
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28942938
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StopIWantToTalkAboutCheese/pseuds/StopIWantToTalkAboutCheese
Summary: Leo Valdez has a special talent for confounding everyone he meets, including the PI who can't seem to escape him.
Series: MISSING: Tales From the Life of a Private Investigator [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1911502
Comments: 10
Kudos: 50





	Why Pyromaniacs are the Worst: A Compilation

**Author's Note:**

> Hi, everyone! My New Years' Resolution is to finish this before 2022. Hopefully that happens. I guess we'll see. Enjoy!

Leo Valdez. A kid nobody seemed to want. He had been bounced around from foster home to foster home, and had run away from nearly all of them. It was a sad story, but hey, every kid Luka had been tasked with had a sad story.

The weird thing about _this_ particular kid was the fire.

That’s right. _Fire._

Luka didn’t know _what_ it was– pyromania, brain damage, or something in between– but fire and Leo Valdez seemed to go hand-in-hand, and the weird thing was that absolutely none of it made any sense.

Luka had worked with pyromaniacs before. He had worked with brain damaged adolescents before. Leo didn’t seem to tick any of the usual boxes.

In fact, the kid seemed to follow him– almost _haunting_ him– ever since Luka had first learned of Valdez’s existence.

* * *

Luka first heard of Leo Valdez the month after his mother, Esperanza Valdez, died. It was all over the news– a freak machine shop fire, killing a single mother and leaving her child alone.

“Fire,” Anthony had mumbled when he heard. “Interesting. I might bring it up with some work colleagues, see what they think…”

“You work in insurance, babe, I doubt they’d have anything else to say that the news hasn’t already covered,” Luka said. “Unless you think the fire wasn’t an accident? Would insurance cover that?”

Anthony took on a more thoughtful look. “It’s just… weird,” he said.

“You can say that again,” Luka said.

_“...Not the first freak fire accident for the Valdez family… strange earthquakes around the area… missing woman only known as Callida, last name unknown…”_ the newscaster warbled on, but Luka was barely paying attention anymore.

“Guess he’s going into the system,” Anthony said, dropping a kiss on Luka’s head and wandering off towards the kitchen. “Poor little guy. He’s just lost everything he’s ever known.”

“Yeah. Poor kid,” Luka had said absentmindedly, and turned back to his book.

Leo Valdez and his sad story were forgotten by midday.

* * *

The second time Luka was confronted with the force of nature that was Leo Valdez, he actually met him. It was the first– and the last– time they would ever meet in person, but it still stuck in Luka’s head.

He had been in Texas working on a case when he’d spotted his friend Lisa, who worked in the police department and had recently moved to Texas, at the side of the road.

He waved, and Lisa’s face lit up.

“Luka! Oh, thank god. Can you lend a hand?” 

“What’s the problem?” Luka called.

Lisa rubbed her forehead as she came over. “There’s this kid named Leo, and… he’s sort of stuck in a tree.”

“He’s what?”

“He climbed up a tree, and he’s not coming down.”

Luka blinked up at the tree in question.

There, sitting in the branches, was a tiny boy with curly black hair and wide eyes.

“That’s Leo,” Lisa said unnecessarily. 

“Okay,” Luka said.

“Can you do us a favor and try to talk him down?”

“...Why?”

Lisa let out a deep, deep sigh. “He doesn’t like us.”

“He what?”

“He doesn’t _like us._ Look, you know kids today. They don’t trust anyone.”

The boy yelled multiple curse words– words Luka was certain nine-year-olds _absolutely shouldn’t know._

Luka looked at the kid. He looked at Lisa.

Lisa shrugged and lifted her palms as if to say _What the heck do you want ME to do, buster? Focus on the kid!_

“I’m a PI,” Luka said. “I don’t do this kind of thing.”

“Yeah, well, he cursed at us in Spanish when we tried to get him down, so we thought maybe seeing someone, y’know, _not in a cop uniform_ might help,” she said.

Luka sighed. He already had a feeling he’d be doing a lot of that today.

He walked over to the tree.

“Hi,” he called up.

“I’m not going back!” the kid said immediately. “You can’t make me!”

Luka paused, squinting up through the sunlight. If he didn’t know better, he’d say the kid was holding _matches,_ or something. There was a definite scent of smoke in the air.

“Do you have a matchstick or something?” he asked warily.

Leo scowled. “No!”

“You– you shouldn’t lie, kid.” Luka could _see_ the smoke wafting up from the kid’s body. _He doesn’t have some kind of lighter up there? Yeah, and pigs fly._

“I’m not lying!”

“Look, why don’t you come on down here and we can talk about it?”

_“Tía Callida_ would let me stay up here,” the boy said mulishly.

Luka could feel a headache coming on. “Your aunt isn’t here, kid. Sorry.” And he doubted that she would let him do that, anyway. What responsible adult let a kid play with matchsticks and climb crazy-tall trees?

“She’s not related to me,” the kid mumbled.

Luka heaved a sigh. “Okay, kid. Sure.”

The kid glared at him.

“Look, kid,” said Luka, “there’s only one way down this tree. You’re going to have to come down sooner or later.”

The kid glared at him some more.

“Sorry,” Luka had said.

Leo had climbed down, Luka handed him off to the police, and that was the end of it.

Or so he thought.

* * *

The next time Luka encountered Leo Valdez was in a busy New York city subway terminal– specifically, a TV wired to the corner of a dirty underground bodega.

_“...chaos in Times Square… hacked by an unknown person or organization… speculation of a larger digital terrorist network…”_

Huh. Well, that was interesting.

“What happened?” he asked the bodega owner, and the man shrugged, flipping a page in his magazine.

Luka looked back up at the TV.

And there, flashing on the screen, was a bright, bold message, blinking all over Times Square:

**ALL THE LADIES LUV LEO!**

The TV anchor droned on: _“...currently receiving reports… fifteen year old Leo Valdez… foster system…”_

Great.

Luka let out a long sigh. Kids these days. 

Well, it was too bad he couldn’t look into it further– he had a different case to solve, and he was pretty sure he’d seen a Hazel Levesque look alike in a coffee shop earlier, which was probably– most likely– _definitely_ a sign of stress. Best not to go chasing random tangents. It was too bad he couldn’t stop getting sucked into them, though.

* * *

“Hey,” Anthony said, about a year after the bodega incident, “did you see the news?”

“No, why?” Luka asked, switching off _Game of Thrones_ to look up at him.

“There was a bomb or something over Long Island.”

“Are you serious?” Luka grabbed the remote and turned on the TV again.

Sure enough, the newscaster was wide eyed but professional, and they were showing some kind of footage on the TV.

Luka rubbed at his eyes. “Are those fireworks?”

“That’s what they’re saying,” Anthony said.

“Seems like a pretty big explosion. I didn’t know fireworks could be that… metallic, either.”

“Yeah.”

“And why was there only one?” Luka squinted at the television. “And it’s the middle of the summer. It’s not even the Fourth of July.”

“Must’ve been a bomb.”

“A bomb, in the sky, over the middle of nowhere on _Long Island?”_ Luka shook his head in disbelief. “It had to have been an accident.”

Anthony shrugged and wandered out of the room, but Luka kept watching.

Apparently, someone had gotten some (very shaky) footage of the incident. As Luka watched, he realized that the explosion looked less like colorful fireworks and more like… well… like something metallic had exploded.

Oh, god. Was it a plane? It would have to be a pretty small plane, but still… maybe a helicopter?

And what was that, shooting up from the ground? It looked almost like a comet, except Luka was pretty sure comets didn’t come from the ground, and also that they didn’t typically scream.

Unbidden, the thought of Leo Valdez and his pyromaniac ways came to mind.

But no.

Leo Valdez, involved in something like _that?_

That would be just plain crazy.

**Author's Note:**

> What did you think?


End file.
